Catheters for draining the bladder are increasingly used for intermittent as well as indwelling or permanent catheterisation. Typically, catheters are used by patients suffering from urinary incontinence or by disabled individuals like para- or tetraplegics who may have no control permitting voluntary urination and for whom catheterisation may be the way of urinating.
Typically, catheters are provided to the user enveloped in a completely sealed and sterilised package. During use and prior to insertion, the catheter is typically removed completely from the package whereby a potential contamination of the catheter may occur, e.g. if the user unintentionally touches the catheter or if the catheter touches surrounding obstacles, e.g. a toilet seat, a wash basin etc. Catheter packages and assemblies of catheters and packages exist, wherein both a proximal end and a distal end of the package may be opened, thus allowing for draining the urine through a catheter which is still at least partly enveloped in the package. Thereby, the user may urinate without completely exposing the catheter and the risk of contamination is reduced. However, since there is a clearance between the inner surface of the catheter package and the outer surface of the catheter itself, urine may flow backwards in the package in a direction opposite to the flow direction inside the catheter. An unwanted situation is that urine or other liquid substances, e.g. a lubricant or water applied to the catheter for the purpose of reducing the surface friction, contaminates the user of the catheter and/or the surroundings.
Since only the inserted part of the catheter is exposed from the package prior to insertion of the catheter, another unwanted situation may be that the user unintentionally forgets to open the other end of the catheter package. An amount of urine may thereby build up in the catheter package and possibly cause a back-flow in the catheter tube. In this case, there is a risk of severe contamination of the surroundings and also a possibility of back-flow into the bladder.
Moreover, existing catheters are provided in various sizes. As an example, catheters, which are relatively long are offered for male individuals whereas relatively short catheters are offered for female individuals. Evidently, more variants of the same product imply problems and costs for the providers of urinary catheters.
Catheter assemblies comprising a catheter and a package which includes an amount of a liquid substance, e.g. a lubricant for a conventional catheter or a liquid swelling medium for a hydrophilic catheter exist. Some of the existing packages provide a combination between a storage volume for sterile storage of the catheter and a reservoir for collection of liquid substances, e.g. for collection of friction reducing substances or for collection of urine. Typically, there is a large disproportion of the storage capacity necessary for storing the friction-reducing substance and the urine, respectively. Accordingly, the known catheter assemblies of this kind are provided with a relatively small storage container for storing the friction-reducing substance inside the relatively large urine reservoir. It is a disadvantage of the known assemblies that the user, prior to insertion of the catheter into the urinary canal, will have to rupture the storage container in order to achieve a reduced surface friction of the catheter. Especially, it is a disadvantage in the event that the catheter is a hydrophilic-coated catheter. In this case, the user would need to open the storage container to allow a liquid swelling medium stored therein to activate the coating and subsequently wait for at least 30 seconds in order to complete the activation of the coating prior to the insertion of the catheter.